You can take my heart, but I can't let you take my dog.

Don't try to follow in my footsteps. Make your own footsteps! No one else can tell the stories that are inside of you except for you.

Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.

I never felt isolated; I just liked being alone. I think that some people are good at being alone, and some people arent, and as a child, I really liked it.

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life.

[On men:] ... you never know what they're like until you get them home and take them out of their packages.

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

People just make stupid mistakes. And they keep making them and keep making them, and suddenly they can't dig themselves out.

I just wanna drink chocolate milk with my lovely!

You must choose the life you live at the time you live it.

We can, after all, learn much from lessons we did not sign up for.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.

Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive-it's such an interesting world.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for the Absolute was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation was culture, not sainthood.

Screaming racism is the last refuge of leftist intellectuals who've completely lost their mojo.

Never be associated with someone you can't be proud of, whether you work for him or he works for you